Shipwrecks by Akira Yoshimura Page B

this seemed to exhaust him. Almost immediately after dinner he would start to nod off and then lie down on his straw mattress.
    The leaves on the trees started to dry, and whirls of fallen leaves rose from the woods behind them and rained down onthe village. The sea, too, began to show the first signs of winter, blustery nor’westers became commonplace, and the chill on the water intensified.
    One day when the sea was calm, after they had been on the water two hours, a ship big enough to carry about four hundred bales appeared from behind the cape to the west, followed by another of about half that size; both disappeared off to the east. At this time of year freshly harvested rice was transported by ship, and the piles of cargo they could see on board were undoubtedly straw bales of rice.
    The next day, on the instructions of the village chief, a makeshift hut was erected on the beach in preparation for salt-making.
    Calm weather continued, but three days later a strong wind started to blow, and spray from the waves smashing onto the shore rained on the houses close to the water. The boats were pulled up away from the water’s edge and tied to stakes driven into the ground.
    That night the first fires were lit under the salt cauldrons. On his way back from the outhouse Isaku stood and looked at the beach. The flames were being fanned by the wind, and he could see people moving. With no stars or moon in the sky, all that could be seen through the pitch-darkness was the dim white of the waves breaking near the fires. From time to time he could feel a mist on his face.
    His mother joined the other women taking the salt from the cauldrons up to the village chief’s house and carrying each household’s contribution of firewood down to the beach. Isaku would take Isokichi out fishing on calm days, and into the woods to collect dry branches for firewood on days when the sea was rough.
    One windy day a calamity befell the village.
    In the evening Kichizo had gone down to the beach to work on the cauldrons; when he returned the next morning, he discovered that his wife had disappeared. He searched for her throughout the village, down by the shore, and in the woods behind the houses, but she was not to be found. From the panicked look onhis face his neighbours could tell that something had happened and they told the village chief. When he was questioned by the chief, it became clear that he had been wickedly cruel to his wife the previous night.
    Kichizo had never been able to rid himself completely of the suspicion that his wife had had a child by another man during her time away in servitude, and at times he still saw fit to torment her. This occasion was another example of his uncontrollable rage. It seemed that, after beating his wife, he had hacked off pieces of her hair, tied her up, then gone so far as to shave off her pubic hair.
    The village chief listened to the man’s confession and concluded that Kichizo’s wife must have been so terrified that she had run away during the night. He ordered several men to hurry to the next village.
    They headed for the pass, but when they stopped to look around the graveyard they found Kichizo’s wife hanging by the neck from a tree not far from the crematory. They cut her body down, wrapped it in straw matting, and carried it back to Kichizo’s house. Kichizo clung to his wife’s body and wept.
    Isaku and his mother went to pay their respects at the wake. The body had been bound tightly in a sitting position with rough twine, back against a funeral post. The three dark bruises he could see on her pallid face attested to the severe beating she had suffered. Her hair was hacked roughly and in places cropped almost down to the skin. Kichizo was kneeling in a corner of the room, head hanging forward. Normally the bodies of those who had taken their own lives were merely thrown into the sea, but because her suicide had resulted from her fear of Kichizo’s